Rip the Angels from Heaven

by David Krugler

  “Understood, sir.” I wanted to ask if he and Dahlen would begin compiling a list of all male Site Y employees who were off the base in early May but knew better than to press. The colonel dismissed me, and Dahlen led me to the anteroom.

  A YOUNG W.A.C. WAS WAITING, A SLENDER GIRL WITH REDDISH-BROWN hair piled beneath her garrison cap. She took me to my billet, driving slowly. The roads were unpaved, and it must have not rained in some time, because the soil was rock-hard and bumpy. We passed young women in civilian clothes: denim pants, checked shirts, headscarves. Many trailed toddlers or cradled babies. What kind of base was this? But I knew better than to ask, remembering what both McAllister and Latham had told me about asking questions. I kept quiet, drawing hard on the Lucky I’d been desperate to smoke during the briefing.

  Officers’ quarters were in a two-story wooden building with a wide veranda. I signed the usual forms, accepted the carbons, collected my allowance of towels, bedding, soap. Listened patiently to the private from the Army’s quartermaster as he told me about the mess and the club. Dinner was still being served, I was hungry, but I decided to stay in my room. If I went to the mess, the steward would seat me with other officers, we’d chat. I had to worry about Latham setting a trap, assigning an overly friendly fellow to try to get me to talk about why I was there. One wrong word, and Latham would pounce, would tell Groves I was no good, couldn’t be trusted, should be sent packing. So, no dinner while I worked out my next move and figured out how to handle Latham. If he continued to stonewall me, I’d be boxed in, all but confined to quarters.

  Didn’t take me long to unpack. Spartan furnishings: single mattress on metal springs, three-drawer dresser, a wooden chair, nightstand, rickety clothes rack with three wire hangers. The room was about ten by twelve feet, with a sash window overlooking a cluster of prefabricated, two-story buildings with tarpaper roofs. They looked a lot like the tempos that clogged the National Mall in D.C. On the horizon, squat trees with twisted trunks dotted the mesa. Junipers? Pinions?

  I changed into khakis and a T-shirt, hung up my uniform and clothes, made my bed. Drawing on another cigarette, I suffered a terrible coughing jag, my lungs constricting. Stubbed the smoke and sat down on the bed, gasping—what the hell? Then I remembered the sign at the Santa Fe station: Altitude 7,199 feet. Awful thin air this high up, I’d better go easy on the Luckies until I adjusted.

  Stretching out on the bed, I laced my fingers behind my head and stared at the ceiling. I could understand Latham’s hostility. All this security, so many precautions; and yet a leak. If General Groves wasn’t worried about a breach, he wouldn’t have signed off on my posting—that meant Latham had to give in. Once he did and he set up a lineup, I wouldn’t have much difficulty singling out the man who’d come to Washington. I’d listen carefully but also make sure I got a look at every suspect so I could make a one hundred percent correct identification. Latham and Groves would toss him in solitary and sweat him but good. I’d have an easy trip back to D.C. I’d doctor up the schematic I’d taken from Himmel and hand it over to the Russians, claiming I’d managed to get it from their spy before he was locked up. Then I could figure out a way to do right by Lyle and Georgette Newhurst for what had happened to their son.

  Suddenly my hopefulness vanished. I was building castles in the air, scheming and dreaming, mistily envisioning a future where every one of my problems, every misdeed, vanished like morning fog, and I got off scot-free. Who the hell did I think I was? Did I really think I could pull all this off?

  CHAPTER 25

  HOW HAD IT COME TO THIS, HOW HAD I JAMMED MYSELF UP SO BADLY? I was no commie, no Red. That kind of commitment requires idealism, faith, beliefs—no such principles had tempted me down Benedict Arnold Boulevard. My motive had been revenge, born of blinding anger and wrenching anguish. I could say that Delphine Moreno’s father gulled me, tricked me, back in Chicago, that he was a nefarious Red who’d captured a naive kid for his cult. But that wouldn’t be true. At discussions at the Moreno dinner table, he’d gently questioned the assertions I’d made with the cocky certitude of youth. Me: The owners built the business, why shouldn’t they keep all the profit? Rosario: But did they build the factory, do they assemble the autos, Ellis? Never correcting, never haranguing, always listening, always asking. I didn’t become a communist under Rosario’s tutelage, I became a better citizen, a well-informed one, capable of understanding how a crippling depression could last eight years with no signs of quitting.

  Besides, I wasn’t in the Moreno home to see Rosario—I was there for Delphine. Five feet tall, at seventeen she already had the striking figure of a grown woman. Whip-smart, a voracious reader, confident and unafraid. Almond eyes, black hair, the dusky complexion of her maternal Sicilian family. But Delphine was indifferent to her beauty, proud only of the flowing hair she wore in a braid. Young girls were supposed to be quiet and deferential, opinionless, to say things like “What do you think?” and “My parents want me to …” Delphine brandished opinions like other girls wore bracelets and charms. She knew more about Shakespeare than our English teacher, she was a Dos Passos fiend. Her writings—stories, poems, observations, essays, aphorisms—filled notebooks. I’d watched her spurn advances from so many classmates that I was almost dumbfounded the day she struck up a conversation with me after English class. She asked if I agreed with our teacher’s description of Macbeth—no, of course not, I said immediately, sensing that was the right answer for Delphine even if I had no idea what I was going to say about Macbeth. What I said, she must have liked, because she kept asking me questions, kept telling me what she thought; and from that day, we were inseparable.

  Until the cops opened fire on the strikers in that field outside Republic Steel. We heard the gunfire, panicked strikers raced past us. I tugged Delphine’s hand so we, too, could run, but she wanted to find Rosario. So we pressed against the stampede, and I was so intent on keeping us from being trampled that I didn’t know what had happened until Delphine dropped to the dirt, gasping her last breaths with her eyes wide open, unable to speak as I cried and shouted, begging God to keep her alive. My first and final prayer, denied.

  “A stray bullet,” wrote one newspaper. “Warning shots gone awry,” reported another. As if the execution of Delphine and so many men was an unfortunate accident, unavoidable, no one’s fault. I knew who was to blame. The cops were just the hired guns, stooges for the bosses, Pinkertons on the public payroll. I wanted to hurt, really hurt, the men who sat in the boardrooms, who racked diamonds on their wives’ hands while chiseling workers’ wages and cheating on their taxes. Everything Rosario had been teaching me now made sense; the logic of Marx, Engels, and Lenin shone as brilliantly as the light that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus.

  But I didn’t want to learn more, didn’t want to preach or proselytize. Instead, I would bore deep into “the system,” my vague term for the economy and the government, and weaken both by helping the communists. I wouldn’t be one of them, just a one-man Abraham Lincoln Brigade—ours would be an alliance forged from overlapping but distinct goals. For the communists, revolution; for me, revenge. What I imagined happening was never clear in my mind. I suppose I envisioned pickets of armed workers turning on the police and mowing down the bosses. I suppose I wished for chaos and cleansing fire, flames from sea to shining sea, a corrupt nation burned to the ground to be rebuilt like the Soviet Union. I don’t think I ever thought much about what, exactly, would or should happen. I merely trusted that whatever I did would satisfy my bloodlust and palliate the pain of losing Delphine. Naiveté, grief, fury—I was ripe for exploitation by the Party. Hell, I was seventeen, and I unassailably believed I could bend the world to my will.

  I begged the grieving Rosario to put me in touch with the unseen functionaries who recruited spies, organized cells, and couriered for the Party. He didn’t want to do it, but I was persistent, and he was too consumed by his own guilt and grief to put me off more than a couple of times. I took tests, endured hou
rs of interrogation, and when I’d proven myself, they told me to enlist in the Navy. When they told me to find a way to get an officer’s commission, I did. When they told me to finagle an assignment to the O.N.I., I did. And when they told me to kill Logan Skerrill for going to the F.B.I., I did, and then manipulated the investigation to frame the communist Philip Greene for the murder I’d committed. Killing Henry Himmel was hastily planned, not quite spur of the moment but far from methodical. But eliminating him had cracked open my cell door, offered me an escape route from the clutches of the Party. And, if all went well, his death yielded the possibility of atoning for my treason. I’d long ago stopped believing that what I was doing for the Party, for the Soviets, would bring me solace for losing Delphine. Yet how to get out? The N.K.V.D. ruthlessly killed anyone even suspected of wavering—to break openly would sign my death warrant and do nothing to repair the damage I’d done to my nation. But if I could identify the Site Y spy, if I gave the Soviets an unusable schematic of the weapon being built here—then, and only then, would I be redeemed.

  I fell asleep; a nightmare woke me up. I was locked in a prison cell, convicted of espionage, sentenced to death. They’d told me I’d be hanged at dawn, and a prison guard was pounding on the cell door, shouting for me to wake up, shouting they had a lot of hangings that day, they had to start and I was first on the list.

  It was more than a nightmare, though—someone was actually pounding on my door in the morning. Six-fifty-five, to be precise. I rolled out of bed, blinking—the overhead light was still on. My mouth was parched, my empty stomach growled.

  “Who’s there?” I croaked.

  The door swung open, an MP strode in, a corporal. “General Groves wants to see you, sir,” he announced, saluting listlessly.

  “Okay,” putting him at ease. I shuffled toward the clothes rack, rubbing my eyes.

  He didn’t leave as I dressed, but I didn’t protest—figuring out why General Groves had to see me immediately took all my attention.

  THE MP LED ME TO A DUSTY JEEP AS I SMOKED MYSELF AWAKE. DESPITE the early hour, the base’s roads bustled with jeeps and cars. He drove badly, braking hard and jerking the steering wheel as we passed other vehicles. Finally we lurched to a stop in front of a nondescript, two-story wooden building with small windows and a tarpaper roof. Army architecture: cheap, functional, bland.

  I didn’t say anything as I stepped out of the jeep, and the MP immediately drove off. Lieutenant Dahlen was waiting for me inside the door.

  “What’s with the rousting?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “General Groves wanted to see you first thing this morning.”

  More to it than that. But I kept that thought to myself. Groves was waiting for us in a spacious, neat office. Rowed file cabinets, wall map of New Mexico, hulking safe, metal desk with just a Bakelite telephone, a manila folder, and a calendar. Colonel Latham was seated on the left side of the desk; the man behind it was Groves. Bristle of a mustache, beady eyes, wavy hair with a streak of gray brushed back from a broad forehead. His brown uniform, slightly rumpled, didn’t sport any fruit salad—not a single medal or campaign strip, just the ribbon with stars on his epaulets.

  Latham put Dahlen and me at ease, and we sat in two wooden chairs placed in front of the desk.

  “I have to know if an envelope exchanged hands, Lieutenant,” Groves greeted me, leaning over his desk. Not quite a glare, his fix on me, but awful close.

  “Sir?”

  “Wake up, Voigt! In Washington in May at the Automat, this Himmel you followed—how do you know the man he met passed him an envelope? You told the colonel”—here a tick of his head toward Latham, who nodded slowly—“you never saw any part of the meeting. So how do you know papers, a package, anything, got handed over?”

  “I—I could hear the rustling on the table, sir, I could hear an envelope sliding over.” I hid my cringe. Jesus H., this was the weakest part of my story. I had the envelope, I knew what was in it, but how could I convince anyone it existed if I wasn’t supposed to have seen it?

  They pounced like circling wolves, Dahlen, Latham, Groves: “It coulda been a newspaper.”—“Your hearing’s that keen?”—“Maybe he was wiping his hands with a napkin!”

  Things were going bad fast, I had to recover.

  “Donniker saw the envelope, General,” looking straight at him.

  “Who’s Donniker?”

  “Filbert Donniker, sir, O.N.I.’s gadget man, a civilian, I’d brought him along, I needed him, he set up the listening gear.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Seated two tables away from Himmel and his contact. For the rig to work, Donniker had to have a microphone near them. It was made to look like a pen. He saw the envelope change hands.”

  “Why isn’t that in the report, it’s not, is it, I don’t remember seeing it,” Groves blustered as Latham shook his head vigorously, murmuring, “S’not in the report, nosir, not in the report.”

  “General, if I may?” I interjected.

  He nodded grudgingly.

  “I don’t know what’s being built down here, sir, and I don’t wanna know, but I do know this, just like I wrote in my report: The man who came to the Automat flat-out said he was done, he was out, he wasn’t going to meet with the Russians anymore. That’s why he arranged the meeting, that’s why he took the risk of coming all the way from Site Y to D.C. He had to convince the Russians he meant it, and he had to give them something big, something tremendous, otherwise they wouldn’t accept him breaking free.”

  All this, true. The spy had told Himmel, “Now memorize this: this is my last delivery, my last contact,” and I’d cited this verbatim in my report.

  Latham protested, “We don’t know for certain that a Site Y employee was the man Voigt heard—”

  Groves waved his hand impatiently at Latham, who zipped it.

  “Then who has that envelope?” Groves’s tone was ominous—I had a lot of story left to sell.

  “Henry Himmel, sir.”

  “Where is Himmel, where is that goddamned envelope?!” He slapped his desk, the metal rang, the telephone receiver twitched in its cradle.

  “Three possibilities, sir. Number one, Himmel’s hiding, dug in deep, where even the N.K.V.D. can’t find him. Biding his time, waiting to cash in that envelope as his life insurance. Number two, someone killed him and took the envelope. Number three, he went back to the Russians, gave them the envelope, and they’ve done whatever they’ve wanted to do to him.”

  Groves exhaled loudly. “Goddammit, every possibility is bad news, the worst headache I’ve gotten since I opened this base—and believe me, Lieutenant, I’ve had some One-A migraines here.”

  I believed him. “Sir, can I tell you what I think is most likely?”

  He flicked his wrist impatiently.

  “I don’t believe the Russians have him, sir. The way they came at me, it’s no dodge, they’re not trying to mislead us into thinking they don’t have the envelope. I worked undercover for Himmel, I got to know him—he got real spooked at the end, just before the meeting at the Automat. He’s been in the States since the thirties, he’s awful clever, he’s had plenty of time to work out his disappearing act. So he doesn’t want the envelope to come to light, it really is his life insurance. Gotta figure he’s stashed it with someone he trusts. That way, if the Russians catch him, he can leverage an exchange—the Russians let him go in exchange for the envelope.”

  Groves was nodding, I liked that, I needed him not to worry about Himmel, needed him to see the problem my way.

  “But if we don’t figure out who met Himmel in Washington, then the envelope isn’t our biggest headache,” I went on. “Because the spy here at Site Y can get another copy to the Russians if he can get off this base. Or even mail it.”

  “Not by mail, not a chance,” Latham piped up. “We handle every piece of mail leaving and arriving.”

  “All right, not by mail,” I said. “Which means as soon as we set up a lineup so I
can identify the man who came to Washington, the Reds will be locked out. You can put the spy in solitary til he tells all. No need for another agency to be involved,” I added, alluding to the O.S.S., “because we’ll be able to handle everything here, quickly and quietly.” Laying out my plan so baldly was risky, might sound suspicious, but this was my only chance to erase Groves’s doubts and prevent him from relying on the O.S.S. to find his spy. And if I had Groves’s ear, Latham might fall in line.

  Or not.

  “We still don’t know that the man Voigt overheard in Washington came from Site Y,” Latham said to Groves, who murmured, “I know, I know.”

  Neither man commented on my suggestion. Dahlen, who still hadn’t said a word, scribbled away, recording the conversation in shorthand.

  What was I missing, what wasn’t I seeing? The man at the Automat had said he’d come from the desert—admittedly, that was vague, even trifling, but how many secret weapons programs in this war could be located in an American desert?

  Dahlen stopped scribbling, Groves and Latham continued to brood. In the worrisome silence, my stomach tensed up as I perceived the reason why Latham still doubted Site Y had produced a spy.

  Because Site Y wasn’t the only base for this project.

  Whatever weapon the military was building with Uranium-235 was so enormous, so complex, that even a base of this size and functions couldn’t do all the work.

  There were other sites, maybe two, maybe ten; I had no way of knowing. Maybe each one was designated by a letter of the alphabet, which would mean I was on the twenty-fifth such base.

  And maybe all the sites were in American deserts for security reasons.

  Jesus H., did I need a cigarette, but no one was smoking out of consideration for Latham’s allergy. If the spy I’d seen and heard in Washington hadn’t come from Site Y, if he was located at a base I didn’t even know existed, I was in big, big—